Shawdesh Desk:

Prominent literary figures including Paul Auster and Gay Talese gathered Friday in Manhattan for a reading of Salman Rushdie’s works, in solidarity with the author seriously injured in a stabbing attack.

More than a dozen acclaimed writers, including friends and colleagues of Rushdie, spoke at the steps of the New York Public Library for the event, which organizers said the novelist had been invited to watch from the hospital.

One week ago Rushdie was about to be interviewed as part of a lecture series in upstate New York, when a man stormed the stage and stabbed the 75-year-old writer repeatedly in the neck and abdomen.

In Rushdie’s honor the American literary journalist Talese, sporting his signature fedora and three-piece suit, read an excerpt from “The Golden House” novel, while Irish writer Colum McCann read from the 1992 New Yorker essay “Out of Kansas.”

A.M. Homes — the American author whose own works including “The End of Alice” novel have triggered controversy over the years — read from Rushdie’s piece “On Censorship,” which was drawn from a lecture he gave in 2012.